


you try and you try

by nicasio_silang



Category: Warchild Series - Karin Lowachee
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-12-22
Updated: 2008-12-22
Packaged: 2018-01-25 06:32:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,239
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1636628
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nicasio_silang/pseuds/nicasio_silang
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jos, in four iterations.</p>
            </blockquote>





	you try and you try

**Author's Note:**

> Written for iambler

 

 

1\. 

The pirates don't find you. You get the smallest gun and lock the rest up, but you go back behind the maintenance grate, you follow regs. You hear things, even through the door, and something through the ventilation system so it sounds like someone's moaning right behind you, and then shouting, and you almost come out then, but you don't. You wait until all noises have faded away, and even the drives of Mukudori herself cycle down and down until they're only a faint buzz against your fingertips when you touch your hand to the hull. And then there's nothing at all. 

When you come out, maybe a full shift later, your knees are stiff and the air smells funny. It's the smell of weapons discharge, and something else, and you don't actually recognize either but they make your eyes sting and water. 

Nobody has come back to find you. You force the hatch open with arms that wobble at the joints. 

And you find them. You find them all. One by one, they won't wake up. One by one, their skin is starting to cool. You don't find them all, but only because you stop looking. 

The atmospherics stopped cycling when the drives died, and it starts to get cold. You go back to your family's bunk to bundle yourself and two of your jackets and one of Daddy's which hung over the ends of your fingers and down to your knees and smelled like him, like the warmth of the engineering room. You shove the hatch closed on the way out.

You step carefully, stopping and starting like a game of hide and seek, all the way to the mess hall. On the way is Derek's mother. She's lying with her arms and legs strewn out, blocking the whole passageway, part of the side of her head is gone, and her eyes are open. You have to step over her to get to the mess hall, but it's a big step. So you run, and you leap, but still your foot catches on her side so you fall, and it stings on your elbows and there's blood on your pant legs now. 

The gun dropped out of your hands and you bat it away like some kid. You cry. You can't help yourself. Mama's eyes were open too, but she didn't see you.

On your hands and knees, wiping roughly at your face, you make it around the corner to the mess, and force closed the hatch behind you. 

You don't leave the mess, not once. You don't know how you'd vent the bodies, and you're too small to drag them anywhere anyway, so they stay where they fell. You don't go to look at them again. But you know they're out there, you can feel them, you think, surrounding you. 

If you peeked out the door you could see Derek's mother's shoe protruding around the corner of the passageway to the right. You don't peek.

Whatever they wanted, it wasn't food, and there are rations to last for a while. The air that's left keeps you until a Hub trawler finds you, Mukudori spinning slow circles around herself, and you in the corner of the mess, legs wrapped under your Daddy's coat like a tent, gasping at the thinning atmosphere, clutching a knife. 

You're small, and you slip through their legs and stick two of them in their legs before another gets you with an injet and you fall asleep for the first time in days.

You grow up on a station. You don't meet him, but you don't know it. You don't meet Falcone either, and the war goes on for ten more years before the demilitarized zone is breached and Aaian-na burns. And you cheer. For the first time in a long time, you feel like a part of something. You jump up and down, and you cheer.

2.

Another time, when you get away, it's too late. You've been with Falcone for eight years, as many years as you were on Mukudori. You're a pirate, despite yourself. 

You call him Symp, no matter what he says. Fucking Symp, Freak-ass Symp, Perv-o Symp, an endless litany that won't stop falling out of your mouth. 

You try to seduce him, and when that won't work, when he just stares you blankly in the eyes until you feel ridiculous, you lash out, and he holds you down, and you lash out, and he holds you down, and you lash out, and he holds you down with his fingers around your throat. 

Even as you lose your breath under his hands you're snarling abuse, and he just holds you, he calmly holds you, and you think, as your heart cycles down like the dying drive of a ship, that he's caressing softly the top of your head, gentling you like one might a child, and shushing you to sleep.

3\. 

Once, it isn't the Warboy that finds you and ghosts you away from Falcone, it's the Macedon. It's only been nine months, maybe a year, maybe 14 months since Mukudori, you're not sure. You're in the room, not Falcone's room, but the room they put you in first, and the one you go to when he feels like making a mess with you. You're tied to the wall in that room when the door crashes down and shouts pour in with jets, real, live soljets. 

And you could scream, and you could cry, but you're in the room so you don't say a thing. You put your hands carefully at your sides and tell them your name when they ask. They march you out, and onto Macedon, and stick you in the brig. It's a cage, and you have no illusions that it might be at least a step up. It's just another cage.

From the passageways outside, you hear someone say that Falcone's dead. "Captain went fucking nuts," you hear. "Slapped Dorr clean across the face for getting there first. Said `He wasn't yours, Corporal. You didn't earn it.' Can you fucking imagine?"

A shift later, Azarcon came to see you. He just stands there and he doesn't say anything, so you don't say anything. He looks all over you, so you sit very still and give him nothing to look at. You pull your fingers very slowly up into your sleeves. It's one of those too-big shirts that Falcone made you wear, and you hate it, but its folds and extra length offer you at least some protection. 

Finally, softly, he says, "I was you, once, Mr. Musey. I suspect I had just the same look as you do right now." And you don't know what he means, but he's still looking at you very closely. "You're in here because I don't know what he's managed to do, you understand. It seems you were with him for some time, and I don't yet know how much he's gotten to you."

Your jaw tightens, and your hands are fists inside your sleeves. You control your breathing so he doesn't notice.

"But I know where you are, Mr. Musey," Azarcon goes on. "I know where you've been and I won't forget it. I have a son, near enough your age. And a home where you can thrive.

"I can't give you back what he took, Jos," he says, coming right up to the bars and squatting down to try and meet my eyes, but I still won't give them to him. "But I can give you something to fill the loss." 

Nine years later, you take a bullet for Ryan Azarcon, and as you bleed out into your adopted brother's hands, Ryan curses you, and shakes you, and tells you that you were always the favorite son. And that's strange, you think, as you lose yourself rapidly, because it's the first nice thing Ryan's said to you since the peace.

4.

And just once, nothing happens at all. The Hub asked politely before taking anything from the striviiric-na. There are no symps, only people who chose to live on Aaian-na, and stay, and learn. Mukudori doesn't die, your parents don't die, Evan D'Silva grows up to be a clever and open man who commands his own merchant ship. There is no Warboy, but there is Nikolas-dan. One day, you even meet him.

You're on Chaos Station, though that doesn't mean anything to you in particular, just that there isn't much to do. You're 17, ship time, and have the run of the station while Mukudori is in dock. It's good to stretch your legs. Adalia's mom wants you to look after her today, but she's 13 now and runs off on her own swearing you to silence and you just grin and let her go. 

You walk the long open corridors past vendors and bars, the crowd around you more dotted with strivs and caste-tattooed humans than you're used to, but it's rare that Mukudori would be this far out into alien space. There's a striv vendor selling long tendrils of fabric which you realize, looking at what the vendor himself is wearing, are garments. You stop to run your hand over them, and the fabric is surprisingly thick, very soft, and you'd buy it if anyone could ever tell you how to wear it. And of course if Paul and Tammy wouldn't give you shit for wearing striv clothes.

Some people will be xenophobes no matter the circumstances. 

A man comes up next to you and speaks to the vendor in striviiric-na. They seem to share a joke, though you can't be sure. He's tall, and human, with dark skin and intricate caste tattoos streaming down the side of his face, around his eye, down the line of his neck disappearing into the garment he wears, much like the ones on the table in front of you. 

He turns to you with humor in his eyes, though not unkindly.

"Do you plan a visit to Aaian-na?" he asks, and gestured at the cloth you still have between your fingers. You put it down.

"No, ah," he's staring at you, staring right at you. You straighten your back against his scrutiny. You look him in the eyes. "I'd like to, one day. But my ship, we're not going there right now." There comes a longish silence and you don't know if you're meant to say more, or he is. You say, eventually, "How long have you, you know. When did you. Go there?"

There's a smile in his eyes and he tells you he was born on Aaian-na. He tells you that, on the planet, the sun shines yellow and orange on ocean and forest, the trees sway in gentle wind and the strivs jumps and glide among them. The rain falls from the summer sky in big, warm drops that burst open on your tongue like bubbling wine. In the north it freezes to snow and covers the land like powdered sugar. Fruit can be plucked right from the branches and vines it grows on. And the people light a little fire for their sadnesses and let them fly into the night, into the sea, and out of their hearts.

You realize you've been walking with this man for a while now, side by side along the corridors of Chaos Station. His name is Nikolas-dan, he says. He asks your name and he says it back to you. 

"Jos-na," he says. "You should visit some day. There are better things than bulkheads."

And you tell him about Mukudori, the starling, the hum of the drives, the long jumps through space when the ship skips itself along the surface of time and space like a flat stone over water. Your mother and your father and their humor and their dreams for you. The Captain and his warm hands, his bravery, his singing voice that comes out at the end of every fifth shift when he lets himself relax. Evan and Indira and little Adalia, everyone you know and how they love you because they share the same bulkheads keeping you all alive, separate from the great void outside, the great nothing you travel through.

You're still talking, walking aimlessly, when you see a read out of the time posted on a wall. You trip over his name and just say, "Niko, I need to get back to my ship. I'm sorry."

"There is nothing to apologize for, Jos-na," he says. "I hope we will meet again."

"Yeah," you say, and on impulse, "What. If you don't mind my asking, what do your tattoos mean? They're a caste thing, aren't they?"

"Yes," he says, and a hand goes to his wrist where you can make out the tapering end of a design. "I am of the artists' caste. A painter. And you?"

"Me too," you say, and it's a strange moment, it's a strange day, he's a strange man who talks softly and moves so smoothly, flowing beside you like you've seen the strivs move. "That's odd," you say to the coincidence.

"A happy surprise, yes," he says.

When you get home everyone asks what you were doing on the station for so long, why they had to wait for your sorry ass, and you pause and you say you got a little lost. You let them laugh at you, it's okay. You keep Nikolas-dan for yourself. 

 


End file.
